Freitag, der 23. Oktober 2009, 15:21 Uhr von Ullrich

Hello everybody,

My web space provider has issues with it’s mail delivery. So just as a quick hint, if you want to send me mails that get rejected with a Delivery Status Notification (Failure) please try my gmail.com mail address ullrich.schaefer@gmail.com

Thanks and apologies for the inconvenience. I’m doing my best to move to a new provider asap.

Montag, der 6. Oktober 2008, 14:05 Uhr von Ullrich

As some of you might know, I have a strong Java background. Documenting my code just feels natural to me. That’s why I was wondering about how to document the code I write in XCode. I found a post on MacDevCenter which describes how to use Doxygen to generate Javadoc like documentations out of Objective-C code. Since this post is quite old (2004) and I want to draw some more attention on the possibilities of documentation in XCode, I’m going to refresh the steps necessary to setup Doxygen for XCode.

First of all you’ll need to get the OS X version of Doxygen from doxygen.org. Doxygen comes in a dmg image. Just copy the Doxygen application into your Application folder.

RGB extension to the series protocol (hope there will be a quasi standard on this soon, more on this later..)

Also there are some constraints I imposed myself:

I don’t want to build it, using an Arduino…

… except for using it to try out hardware layouts and burn the micro controller

So I want to modify the original 40h firmware and burn it on an ATMega micro controller probably the ATMega32 (as i already got two of those)

I’m not sure yet how I’ll proceed with the illumination of the 128 RGB button, but I don’t want to use the SparkFun SPI RGB LED Matrix BackPack (long name, i know)… But this need a lot of further investigation, and I’m looking forward to it

So stay tuned as the next time I’m going to give a short summary about current running projects that try to build similar or comparable projects.

Mittwoch, der 3. September 2008, 20:57 Uhr von Ullrich

Finally i started a new category on my blog: Monome
Like the coding category this one will also be in English as it targets a quite international audience.

So first of all, welcome all you monome’ers around the globe. You’ll probably get the idea quite fast

But for all non monome-aware folks just a short introduction:Monome (pronounce it as you like.. ) is, first of all, a box with an illuminated button grid. Typically 8×8.
It’s mostly used to “create music” but in fact is more versatile than that. Basically it sends information about button presses via USB to the computer which can send information about lighting up LEDs in return. All of this happens asynchron.

There’s lot of open source software that was created for the monome. A list can be found in the monome wiki.

The whole device is open source too, meaning the firmware is open sourced, the hardware layout is open source an we build a great community which is very enthusiastic about helping each other.

Since I got myself one of those precious (only 400 were made of the one i got) devices for last christmas (a monome 40h original with build in accelerometer, yay! ) I instantly fell in love with it. It also got me into physical engineering. And that’s what this is all about…

I’m going to build me a monome!

You got one already?!.. you might think. But that’s not the point. You can’t have enough of those boxes
Further I’m aiming to gain experience with firmware coding, soldering, reading datasheets and everything around. And yes, I looove blinking lights!!!

So again, welcome all of you!!!

In the following days I’ll tell you more about what exactly I’m planing to build. This will be totally abnormal! Trust me

Donnerstag, der 3. Juli 2008, 17:56 Uhr von Ullrich

Hello,

I just wasted 2 days finding a damn problem with the mentioned combination. What i tried to do ist: Using JAXB from within a APT AnnotationProcessor from within ANT.

Now to the problem:

From within my processor i could access the classes in the jaxb jar files (jaxb-api.jar and jaxb-impl.jar) but when i tried to unmarshal some XML file, i got a ClassNotFoundException. See http://pastie.org/227136

I tried thousands of things to fix this. Passing the classpath in multiple ways. Even passing a new bootstrap classpath, but non worked.

After lots of try and error, some conversations on #java@freenode (http://pastie.org/227143) and a look at the JAXB sources i found the solution in passing the classloader of the calling class when instantiating the context:

Sonntag, der 15. Juni 2008, 19:40 Uhr von Ullrich

I had a look inside ActiveResource as it is part of Rails since version 2.1, and tried to use it to access the DiscogsAPI. It turned out to be a bit difficult and required a bit more coding than accessing a regular Rails RESTful API.

That’s the reason why i created a Rails Plugin which supports the basic tasks for now (getting releases, artists and labels). Future versions will support searching and caching and a bit more.